…pick it up, and all day long you’ll have good luck”.

While attacking a wayward plant with the whipper snipper the other day I found a coin. I couldn’t tell what it was as it was in such bad condition. I soaked it in Coke overnight and all the dirt and corrosion had dissolved and I could see that I had found an Australian penny piece minted in 1957. Now Australia went decimal on 14th February 1966 so it has probably been lost for at least 59 years. Hardly worthy of Time Team, but interesting all the same. 

Australia was a very different country in 1957. Robert Menzies was prime minister. Aboriginal people didn’t have the vote and the White Australia policy was in full swing and married women weren’t allowed to work in the Public Service, and Australia’s Wallabies had lost the Bledisloe Cup to New Zealand’s All Blacks – somethings never change.

In case you are wondering inflation has meant that 1d from 1957 would be now worth 96c.

To photograph the coin I got out my 12 year old Olympus EM1 and matched it with the Olympus 60mm f2.8 macro lens. The camera has a focus stacking function where it can take lots of images of the subject while the lens is wide open and combine them in camera to produce an in image where the whole subject is in focus. For the lighting I used three flash guns fired by a wireless radio trigger. I’d not used flash like this for ages as I’d gone over to using LED lights as I can use them to shoot both stills and video. With no video to shoot I could use speedlights. When it came to editing the photos I found that the in camera focus stacking had had a hard job with the coin and there were lots of artefacts. It seems that the texture of the coin was causing it to have problems. So I had to resort to stacking the image in Photoshop.

Did my penny bring me good luck? Well let’s say I’m still waiting.